News, Commentary and Insights from the Flash Player and AIR Product and Engineering Teams

Archive for August, 2012

With yesterday’s announcement that Amazon Appstore has launched in Europe, game developers using a Flash technology workflow will be able to deliver even more apps to more customers worldwide. We’ve previously highlighted how developers can use Adobe AIR to deliver apps to the Kindle Fire, and as of today, those developers can deliver localized versions of their apps to the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

The expansion of the Amazon Appstore presents a great opportunity for developers to monetize their apps, and a number of games profiled on the Adobe Gaming site have seen some success there, including Machinarium and Spaced Away. Amazon’s growing audience now includes over 180 Million active customer accounts with 97 Million monthly unique visitors. AIR developers can use the Amazon Mobile App Distribution Program to target millions of customers on Amazon and Kindle Fire, and apps are marketed to customers on Amazon marketplaces, Kindle Fire, Android phones and tablets, and through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

If you’d like to find out more about how to deliver your apps to the Amazon Appstore, both in North America and Europe, check out the Amazon developer resources.

There’s a lot of excitement about the work the Adobe Gaming team is doing with Unity, giving game developers more choice in using their favorite tools to target the Flash Player via Premium Features. At Unite, we showed off previews of Unity games that will be published to Flash Player, including Madfinger’s Shadowgun in Facebook and Nickleodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which you can see in this video. With the announcement of the Unity 4 preview, we expect to see even more Unity games running in Flash and hope to showcase more of these for you later this year.

Today, we released the latest version of the Flash and AIR runtimes with Flash Player 11.4 and AIR 3.4. These new builds feature a few great features that gaming fans will be excited about; most importantly, we’re increasing the devices that can take advantage of hardware acceleration so game developers can give more gaming fans smoother and more exciting game play.

Along with adding constrained Stage 3D, we’ve also provided added support for iOS application development, and introduced concurrency, which helps improve game responsiveness. Gaming evangelist Lee Brimelow will be walking users through the new features and upcoming tooling updates in a demo on August 23.

We’ve been laying some groundwork this year for increasing the speed at which updates to the Flash Player are adopted. Flash Player 11.2 introduced background updating, and over 400 million people opted in to use it. That means that with any new release of the runtime, 400 million users can be updated to the latest version of Flash Player in about 48 hours. To put this in perspective, 400 million is about six times the number of Xbox360’s sold since 2005. Game developers can now quickly embrace new features knowing there’s a huge audience waiting for them.

We’re also working closely with partners to help extend the reach of the Flash Player. This week, the gaming team is at the Unity Unite conference in Amsterdam, where we will be talking about Premium Features for Flash Player and showing off some great new games that were developed using a Unity workflow – Madfinger’s Shadowgun and Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These are just two in the upcoming lineup of new games targeting the Flash Player, and the gaming team is really looking forward to talking with developers at Unite and learning more about their plans and creations. To hear more, check back in later this week, and take a look at the current showcase of games at http://gaming.adobe.com/.

It’s a busy week for events, and you can also find members of the Adobe gaming team speaking at CEDEC in Japan, where GREE will be talking about developing MONPLA SMASH, the newly-released free-to-play RPG action battle game – its first mobile social game built on Adobe AIR and now available on the iOS AppStore.

And finally, you’ve got to be in it to win it! PlayerScale’s Player.io, in cooperation with Epic Game Ads, has announced their first Epic Flash Game Contest with some sizable payouts (total cash prizes worth $150,000US). This contest is for multi-player games targeting Flash Player, and you can see the rules and start building your Flash games today – http://office.playerio.com/competitions/ega2012/#register.

We’re proud to announce the release of Flash Player 11.4 and AIR 3.4. Flash Player 11.4 takes game development to a new level with the new ActionScript Concurrency (ActionScript workers) feature, which helps developers create more responsive games and apps by offloading tasks and computations to background workers. Game content is more responsive as these workers run concurrently to leverage more machine resources while helping to avoid UI freezes and other events that slow down game play.

In addition to concurrency, Flash Player 11.4 adds other core features, including webcam support for StageVideo so Flash Player can utilize GPU acceleration to render better performing webcam video streams. And now Stage3D content can run in hardware accelerated mode on broader range of desktop GPUs/ hardware, particularly on the Intel GMA chipsets, thanks to Stage3D constrained mode. In addition, the Starling framework has been updated to be constrained mode ready.

You might ask, how many end users can enjoy these new release features? Over 400 million users have already installed Flash Player 11.2, and with background auto-update, a feature we released in Flash Player 11.2, these 400 million connected users get updated within 6 weeks of every new release. And there are many more factoids on Flash Player reach here.

With the release of AIR 3.4, we are introducing several enhancements to our support for iOS app developers. Key features include iOS push notifications, iOS 5.1 SDK support, compressed texture with alpha for stage3D and Webcam support for StageVideo. Click here to learn more about AIR 3.4 features including features that apply to the iOS platform.

A great platform requires great tooling so we are also providing a Flash Builder 4.7 beta on labs in the last week of August. It will have support for Apache Flex 4.8, support for Flash Player 11.4 and AIR 3.4 and many improvements to iOS app development workflows including USB debugging, iOS simulator support, and direct on-device deployment.

Screenshot of iOS feature in Flash Builder 4.7 Beta

A Flash Professional updater will be released in early September and will have many exciting features for you to choose from and experiment with, including ToolKit CreateJS 1.1, support for Flash Player 11.4 and AIR 3.4, improved iOS app development workflows including iOS simulator support, and direct on-device deployment.

Screenshot of iOS Simulation in Flash Professional

We’re excited to see what you build with these new releases. For more information on gaming development, please visit the Adobe Gaming site.

Want to engage in epic battles on a planet riddled with monsters? We thought so!

GREE launched its first mobile social game using Flash technology for the iPhone today. MONPLA SMASH is the company’s free-to-play RPG action battle game that delivers stunning graphics through an Adobe AIR app and we are excited to have worked with them to bring this game to market.

As one of the leading gaming companies, we are thrilled to see GREE take advantage of the cross-platform delivery options provided by Adobe to release this innovative mobile social game worldwide, as a native iOS app, using its existing workflow. MONPLA SMASH is a great example of how AIR addresses the growing demand for high-impact social games with amazing graphics across leading mobile devices.

Adobe Premium Features for Flash Player give publishers and game developers the ability to deliver stunning, web-based games across browsers to over a billion computers — dramatically expanding the market for a new class of social gaming experiences. Now publishers and developers can create new revenue opportunities by targeting Flash Player for distribution of games developed using C/C++ and third-party tools and game engines, such as Unity.

The XC APIs allow existing C/C++ codebases to run efficiently sandboxed across all major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. C/C++ developers, and developers using other third-party languages and middleware/engines, can now join ActionScript developers in benefiting from the ubiquity of Flash Player on desktop computers. And ActionScript developers can choose to leverage millions of lines of existing optimized C/C++ code in their ActionScript projects.

If you are using Premium Features in your content, activating them from the licensing website is easy:

Tell us the name of your game and the domain(s) where it’s hosted.

Download the verification file and upload it to the root directory of the domain(s) that serve(s) your SWF files.

Once the domain is verified, Flash Player will enable Premium Features for your content.

Learn more about how Premium Features can help bring your existing games to the largest audience in gaming. And if you’re a C/C++ developer, learn more about the Flash Runtime C++ Compiler. We’re excited to help you bring a whole new level of gaming to the web.

We’re very excited to announce on Saturday August 4th we delivered our first Flash Player 11.4 Beta update using the Flash Player background update system that was introduced in Flash Player 11.2. Background updates seamlessly bring new features, bug fixes, and security updates without a single mouse click needed from our beta users.

How is this going to help you as a user? You don’t have to worry if you have the latest Beta version of the Flash Player- you will automatically receive the latest and greatest updates and features within the first 24 hours of release.

Flash Player 11.4 introduces key features like ActionScript Workers and the new Stage3D constrained mode to run games hardware accelerated on more configurations. For more details, check Adobe Labs.

Background updates will only be delivered to users with the Flash Player 11.4 Beta currently installed, who selected “Allow Adobe to install updates” when installing the beta version of Flash Player. Users who opt-out of having Flash Player background updates will have to manually get the latest Beta version from Adobe Labs.

You can also change your Flash Player global settings to allow background updates as highlighted here.